The Double Bind of Mr. Rigby (27 page)

There was no return. It was the end of the affair. Raoul’s death had affected her in a way that I could not have anticipated. When I rang her later that evening she did not come to the phone. One of the well-spoken secretaries, or whoever they were, told me that she was not receiving calls and was keeping to her room. She was grieving. I thought it natural. She would take a day or two to come to terms with her loss and change of circumstances. Then we would reunite joyously.

I was wrong. I realised I did not know her at all. Our relationship had been entirely physical. There was no depth, no loyalty, no meeting of souls. She enjoyed me as she might have enjoyed a series of short holidays. She remained incommunicado. After about a week I realised that she was not going to speak to me. The last time I rang the Spanish residence I was told that she had returned to her mother in the south of France. I had stayed there once at the neat house in Beaulieu-sur-Mer close to Nice. I imagined her there looking out on to the glittering sunlit sea wrapped in her memories of Raoul. I reckoned that there was little space in her thoughts for me.

During that time of anxiety and disappointment, I spoke to both Uri and Willy. My suspicions were justified. Uri rang me at the
Journal
and we met for lunch in a local delicatessen.

‘You sent us at the right time, old man,’ he said. ‘Our boys made it an easy job. Great work, Pel. Myrex is on the skids.’ Raoul’s name was not mentioned once. Everything was understood. ‘Keep looking and writing. You can be useful for us.’ He thought I should have some payment. There were special funds, but I found it all distasteful. My conscience did not sit easily with me. I had been the agent of a man’s death. I was not comfortable with it even though Raoul Gimenez was a ruthless murderer.

Willy’s conversation was different. I remembered that he said he would be in touch, that the Service might want me to do something for it. I met him one evening in our club after Uri had spoken to me. What Willy did was to make an offer and my life shifted into a different gear.

‘I want you to meet the director, Pelham. What you’ve done with Myrex has really impressed people at the top. They want you engaged with us.’

My immediate assumption was that they knew of my involvement and my connection with Uri, and I was right.

Willy continued, ‘Your work with Uri Rovde was invaluable. We want you with us. We have lots of people who work for us. You keep up your present job, again invaluable to us, as a journalist, an investigative journalist, but you are with us at the same time. Of course you are bound to secrecy. That goes without saying. But you can do things for us. You’ve access to information that we don’t have. We want you with us.’ He added, ‘On a formal basis.’

That week altered the direction of my life completely. Roxanne wrote herself out of it, and I joined forces with the Service. They wanted my pledge and they got it. I met the director, considered his proposals, thought long and hard about what I owed to the memory of Mark and committed myself.

It took some nerve. In one of many interviews that I had to submit to, Willy’s old question cropped up. I might be called upon to kill someone; was I prepared to do so? In a way, I felt I had already. After a moment’s pause and after the dreadful murderous scene at Paldiski had flashed across my mind, I answered yes. I felt myself the same as being a soldier prepared for battle.

Myrex foundered. The forces that it had come up against, the weapons of two immensely powerful states were so crushingly effective that Myrex could not retaliate. It had lost its leadership. In that war between organised crime and the state, in the end the state has more staying power. The Security Services operate without conscience; they owe no obligations to an individual who has played his part. They must hurry on, prosecute the next business, cut the next deal. Myrex did not compete; it went out of business. Arne was gone, assassinated. He had vanished into my past along with Roxanne. She never tried to get in touch with me again.

Out of the ashes of Myrex my new career began. On the day that the newspaper business pages were full of the news of Myrex’s collapse, I was sitting in the garden of the Lord High Admiral in Pimlico having left the
Journal
’s offices in the early evening. I had ordered a glass of Kronenbourg and was trying to relax, lamenting the fact that there was no Mark to meet. My mobile rang and it was Willy. ‘We need you to do something, Pelham. Call into the office tomorrow some time. You’ll be expected.’

There was the order. I was under contract now. I could not refuse.

Brian Martin was appointed MBE for Services to English Literature in 2002. His literary criticism has appeared in the
Spectator
, the
Times Literary Supplement
, the
Financial Times
and
Literary Review
. He lives in Oxford, where he spent most of his career as a teacher. His first novel,
North,
was published by Macmillan New Writing, in 2006. His second novel,
Latimer,
was published in 2013.
The Double Bind of Mr Rigby
is his third, and he continues to write.